Cafe Monteverde Tour

We were picked up at Hotel Belmar at 8:30am for a half-day coffee plantation tour. I was expecting it to be good but this tour went beyond my dreams.

Choosing a Coffee Tour in Monteverde

There are surprisingly a lot of options. I choose Cafe Monteverde because they appeared high on a list of things to do in Monteverde and because they focus on agricultural sustainability. I really liked that this company focused on a good relationship with the land and I wanted my tourist dollars to go to a good company.

Animal Farm

I totally did not expect a nearly fully-working farm on the coffee plantation site but our tour guide explained that they use the animals for manure and for fuel. The pigs actually help produce the methane used for heating! Our tour guide did an excellent job of explaining the science behind what they do with the animals and the plants.

Coffee

I am not really a coffee drinker (most of the time it just gives me a headache) but Will loves the smell and culture of coffee. Our guide brought our group into the forest and we talked about how they grow coffee and how they incorporate the natural environment around them. You could really see how passionate he was about sustainability.

We then spent some time in the actual coffee plantation looking at different species of trees, growing stages, and diseases.

The Tasting

I think this is the part everyone else had been waiting for. But in true educational fashion, our guide showed us the small processing center and gave us a mini-test of the different types of coffee we learned about. We passed with flying colors 🙂

We totally bought this cool coffee maker below & a candle made of coffee at the end of the tour!